Biggest Fossil Rat

Biggest fossil rat found, according to a report in ABC News in Science, and Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 17 Jan 2008. South American fossil researchers have found the largest fossil rodent in the San Jose Formation on the coast of Uruguay, dated as 2-4 million years old. The fossil is a giant rat whose skull is 53cm long and may have weighed in at over a tonne. The largest living rodent is the capybara, which can weigh up to 60 kg. The new fossil has been named Josephoartigasia monesi. It had enormous incisor teeth, but its grinding teeth and the bones that form the attachment sites for chewing muscles are small. The researchers suggest it lived in an “estuarine or deltaic system with forest communities” and ate soft vegetation, fruit and aquatic pants. The ABC article commented: “Its food intake must have been vast, given its huge size.”

Editorial Comment: A large animal that lived in places of rivers and forests and where it ate vast amounts of soft vegetation and fruit would have thrived in a well watered world where all animals ate plants, such as the one described as created by God in Genesis, but this lush, fruitful environment no longer exists. Particularly after the ecological disasters that commenced following Noah's Flood, when food became scarcer and tougher, so that eventually some creatures became first scavengers and then carnivores. As a result most animals could not grow as large as they had before, and many died out. This decrease in size and loss of variety is the opposite of evolution, but is fully consistent with the Biblical history of creation Fall Flood etc. (Ref. gigantism, rodents, diet)